“Mukti” means “Freedom”

mukti/freedom/

muk-tee/fri:dam

noun

– the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants

– the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved

Our Background

We’re a small gamedev studio from India called underDOGS and the one writing this piece is me(Vaibhav), the founder! We started making games back in 2011 and have made over 200 games so far majority chunk involves client work.

The Problem

Human Trafficking, although illegal remains a significant problem in India. It has already affected over 65 million Indians where they’re frequently trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation and bonded labour.

Storytelling

Currently we’re seeing a big wave of Indian game developers taking risky leaps by following their passions to tell beautiful regional stories. But couple of years back we’ve been reading a lot about the trafficking issue, we thought of attempting to tell a story based on this traumatic setup! Mukti speaks about the story of such people, surely it doesn’t tell what should be done to avoid it! But this could end up creating social awareness on the topic to a wider audience through an interactive narrative based game! Hence, Mukti!

Theatre

Theater has taught us a lot throughout our journey, specifically an effective way for expressing. Couple of us are connected to theater and dramatics, myself performing on stage, acting and directing regional plays for over 10 years now. Experience on theater has helped us a lot in narrating and conveying the story in the right and effective way.

The Start

With all these things in place, we decided to kickstart the project back in 2017! As far as the setup was concerned, we wanted to portray as much India as we could in it! Being a small team, having a closed game environment was a no-brainer to avoid huge environmental assets. Hence, the museum as the central environment came into picture, which gave us a liberty to depict anything and everything that relates to India in either realistic or miniature form! Now the only challenge was to bind the story and gameplay together! We’ll take you through the whole journey in the coming posts.

Mukti is a first person story exploration game based in a ravishing Indian museum talks about India’s one of the brutal social issue, Human Trafficking!

Developed by underDOGS in collaboration with WanderMind Labs for Steam, Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch!